Coming Soon...

We have some new critters coming to the homestead (barring any freak occurrence that keeps it from happening). Stay tuned. This is one of two critters I've been wanting for a while now. I'm so excited!

And to hold you over until then, here's Tease being extra miserable this pregnancy.

Goat Kid Update!

With the weather being as warm as it has been, we've been taking advantage by cleaning out the raised beds, starting seeds, and staying as busy as possible. However, I thought we'd give a brief update on the goat kids.

The Snubian (saanen x nubian) doelings are growing so well. I can't wait to see how the perform on the milk stand. I love these girls.

Our first Nubian kid was born this week. She's still in the gangly stage, but I know she'll end up being a beautiful goat, and hopefully a great milker.

I love her coloration. She has a single moon spot on her tail. Just a beautiful girl.

Snubian doelings

A quick moment of zen.

First arrivals!

Just arrived! Two NubianxSaanen (aka Snubians) doelings

Sleeping with warm water bottles.

When they say good things come to those who wait, they aren't kidding. After being disappointed that one of our Saanen does had aborted, we are thrilled to welcome these two little ladies to the homestead. Both of these girls are out of a Kastdemur Nubian buck. They are beautiful little ladies that I'm sure will have no issues putting yummy milk into the pail.

Not a bad way to start the kidding season here!

Bummer

It appears that one of our does aborted at some point, and tricked us with her big belly. We are hoping she was bred this past week for kids in the summer. Our next doe isn't due until the 19th. I am ready for milk again, so the 19th can't get here fast enough.

Heat Treating Colostrum

We feed pasteurized milk and heat treated colostrum to our goat kids. It makes it easier to sell excess kids when you test for CAE annually and practice prevention this way. Now, when you heat treat colostrum, you have to hold the temperature above 135 degrees F, but below 140 degrees F. This temperature is held for 30 minutes once reached. If you heat colostrum at a higher temperature, it turns into pudding.

The easiest way we've found to do this is with this little guy--a small, cheap deep fryer. We fill it to the max line with water, use small glass jars in the basket, and played with the dial until we found the spot to keep our temps within that range. We made a notch to mark this temperature spot on the dial, and now we can just put the dial there for heat treating colostrum in the future. It beats standing over a stove and moving a pan off and on the heat source as to not end up with too low of a heat or colostrum pudding.

And we wait...

My big brick house mama goat is due on Tuesday. I have been checking on her throughout the day, and she seems happy and content. I am so ready for another round of bottle babies. I'll keep my ear out for any hints of impending labor via the barn/baby monitor. Come on babies!

White Christmas

After much discussion and thought, we have moved to a Saanen-only herd. We couldn't resist. Their easy going personalities and gentle nature fit perfectly with our own. We are expecting the first round of kidding to begin in roughly two weeks. We'll be sure to share plenty of baby goat photos.

Hopefully, blog updates will pick up soon. I seem to be doing better in terms of morning sickness, so that should help out some. ;)

My Kids--Caprine Variety

The goat babies are doing very well. We ended up with two bucklings from Tease, and a buckling and doeling from Chessie. I really wanted a doeling from both, but at least we got one. In the video you'll see 5 kids. We actually bought an Alpine buckling to be sure we could breed the girls this year. We're hoping to get a Saanen buckling, but the doe I want a buck out of hasn't kidded yet, so we'll have to wait and see!

Tease with her bucklings. Shortly after this photo was taken, she started trying to ram her babies. They've been bottle fed from the beginning.

This is Fred. He and his brother Scruffy as VERY friendly. I hate to sell them because they are so sweet.

Cheeto is the first kid born on our farm. He is sticking around as a buddy for our buckling Thor.

And our Grand Prize--Heidi.

Mr. HH always loved the look of Oberhasli goats, and he is thrilled by Heidi's coloration. Hopefully she grows out well enough to be bred in the fall. Unfortunately, Chessie freshened with a problem udder. One side seems to be having issues. The vet will be checking her out again this week to see if it's fixable. Even if it's not, the good half of her udder is giving us 1/2 a gallon everyday. Tease is already giving us OVER a gallon a day!

All that said, be prepared to see some posts of my attempts at making cheese!

The Waiting Game...

As I'm typing this post, I am listening to the soothing sounds of goats chewing their cud via a baby monitor that's been strategically placed in our barn. We are waiting for our goats to kid. Typical goat gestation length is 150 days. Our alpine is on day 151. This is our first kidding, and we are very anxious to have some baby goats to cuddle.

To pass the time, I thought it might be fun to have our first giveaway! Now I can't give you anything too exciting, but I would like to send out some seeds to help someone else start their own little homesteading efforts. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on this post. In your comment list some things you've wanted to try planting, but haven't. Maybe you'd like to try planting Swiss Chard this year or some different varieties of winter squash. Jot it down in the comments, and maybe you'll end up with an envelope of goodies headed your way.

Baby and Kids

Little Man has been keeping us plenty busy. Here he is dreaming about spring...at least his mom and dad are!

To try to get in a bit of early "dirt" time, I separated my aloe pups from the mother plant and potted them. I also had to throw away the rosemary plant that didn't agree with growing in my kitchen. I'll try again with the rosemary, as it's a great herb for cooking.

Here's Chessie asking me if she looks fat. I kept a straight face and told her she was still as beautiful as ever. I can't wait to have goat milk again. Little Man's belly doesn't agree when I eat cow's milk dairy. This isn't a big deal for me, but the goat's milk is an entirely different story. I really don't want to have to miss out on goat cheese, ice cream, and my favorite, steel cut oats with warmed goat milk.

We can't wait to see our goat kids (Arriving in mid-late March)! I'm crossing my fingers that I get some doelings. I'd especially love for Tease to have a doeling, as I've heard great things about the Saanen/Alpine crosses. We're almost completely done getting our kidding kit together.

Hopefully, we'll be able to post about our garden plans fairly soon. This growing season promises to be an exciting one!

Milking Time!

We are now only milking Tease once a day. She has done really well for a first freshener, and I can't wait to see how she milks with her next freshening.

The biggest complaint about milking now is my milk stand. Don't get me wrong, I love my milk stand, but I wish we would have built it with an area to the side that I could sit while milking. It's normally not a problem for me to milk while sitting on the stand, but it has become a bit more difficult now that my center of gravity has been changed by an ever-expanding belly.

Fortunately for me, Mr. H has been gracious enough to take over milking duty for the time being.

Our Current Milk Stand

We used the plans from Fiasco Farms, with a few slight modifications for our own preferences. Those plans can be found HERE.

The grain feeder had to be screwed in because Tease likes to pull it off and toss it around.

Tease has a great let down, and is very easy to milk. We usually finish milking well before she's done eating her grain.

Tease finishing her grain.

Mr. H showing off a bucket of fresh milk!

I'm hoping to build an extra seating area that is level to the milk stand before Spring. I'd love to have this so we can be a bit more comfortable, especially since we'll be milking more than one goat!

Goat Barn Pen Update

I wanted to give a final update on our barn pen for the goats.

Mr. Homesteader built a hay feeder and put it up in the pen.

We put up the bucket holder for their water bucket. These little metal bucket holders have proven to be VERY handy for us.

There's also a small bucket of baking soda in this picture. We had both goats out there the other night, and wanted to make sure they had access to this. We'll be buying a mineral/baking soda feeder to attach in there soon.

We've had the goats in there twice now overnight, and they seem to approve. When we go out to check on them, they are usually just laying around chewing their cud.

I'll leave you with a photo we took a few days ago. We had some sleet/rain and when the sun decided to peek out of the clouds, this is what we saw.

Big sister and little sister were both squealing with delight over the "double rainbow."

Just a few final touches...

Well, Mr. Homesteader is still out in the barn working on a few final touches for the goat pen. He is moving some of the electrical wiring to put a light in over the pen. He's also building a hay feeder for the pen as well. Other than that, we're good to go!

We braced the posts on the outside of the pen for extra support as they do like to lean on the pen. It's not the prettiest pen, but it was remarkably cheap considering we had most of what we needed here. I'll take functional over pretty any day!

We have the goats out in the barn pen now. We were concerned about the goats being messed with around Halloween night, and decided to take the extra precaution.

Now we'll be using this pen when it gets closer to kidding. I'm very excited to expand our dairy herd!

Goat Barn Pen Progress

Not much going on right now. Mr. Homesteader spent some time yesterday working on the goat pen we're putting in the barn. We're hoping to create a small outside pen as well to hold our goat kids in the spring.

Here are some pictures of the barn pen progress.

There's still a bit more to do (including building a gate) before it's done, but we're almost there!

Getting the Goats Ready for Winter

We've been preparing ourselves to care for the goats this winter. Both of our girls were bred, so we are preparing for both of them to kid in March, as well.

The first thing we did was buy almost 80 bales of alfalfa hay. We were lucky enough to get some second cutting hay. This wasn't a great year for hay in our area, so we feel fortunate that we were able to get this hay. We'll probably try to get a few more bales before too long. We don't mind having a little extra.

We stacked the hay bales on pallets to keep it on the floor. I admit, I love the smell of good hay.

Since the goats will be kidding in March, we're also constructing a pen in the barn for them. We'll bring the goats in at night during the colder parts of winter, and keep them in there closer to their kidding dates. I need to get a baby monitor to make sure we can catch the kids as we will be practicing CAE prevention with our goats and their kids.

Mr. Homesteader and Big Sister taking measurements for the pen.

We are also in the process of winterizing the goat shed. We cleaned out the old bedding to put in fresh bedding while we were out there. The old goat bedding was spread over part of our garden space. Hooray for free fertilizer!

Here is Mr. Homesteader cleaning out the old bedding.

I will try to document more of the progress with the goat pen in the barn as well as winterizing the goat shed. I know Mr. Homesteader and my father-in-law will be working on the barn pen this week.

Farm Update- We Are Still Around!

A lot has happened since our last post. I'll try to catch you up on the more exciting bits.

Around the time of our last post, we got one of these.

It was very exciting for us to find out. It's even more enjoyable now that the morning sickness phase has passed!

We were even lucky enough to see the little guy!

Not long after this little guy makes his appearance, we'll be enjoying some other new arrivals on the farm! Both of our goats have been taken to be bred for spring kids! We heard news earlier this week that our Alpine doe was bred! Next year, we should have enough milk to experiment more with making our own cheese!

Chessie- Our Alpine Gal

We also took the hogs to the butcher. We miss having them around. They made short work of any food scraps we had in the house. However, we can't complain too much because we enjoyed some FANTASTIC pork chops for dinner tonight.

It's nice going into winter knowing this is here for us.

Additionally, some of our new Welsummer hens have started laying their dark brown eggs! We're still waiting to see some of the green eggs from our Easter Egger girls. I will say though, we are quickly becoming fond of the Easter Eggers. They have great personalities. There are a few that will just walk up to my four year old and invite her to pet them!

Here you can see a Welsummer egg nestled between eggs from some of our other chickens.

Finally, we've sold all our of pine trees! This gave us money to replace some windows in our house before it gets too cold. More importantly, it gives us more space to add on to the small orchard we've started. We will be using part of the cleared space, and space we already had cleared, to put in a small hay field for the goats!

Bye Bye Trees--Hello Spring Projects!

Is there anything you've done lately, or even something you are planning that you are particularly excited about? Feel free to share with us in the comments!

All Around the Mulberry....Tree?

We have several mulberry trees around our property. Now, around here, most farmers are quick to chop the mulberry trees down, but our mulberry trees have a varietly of purposes.

1. They provide a nice place for us to put our behive(s). We only have one now, but there will be more in the future. I'm looking forward to building some top bar hives this fall and trying them out in the spring.

2. The goats appreciate the shade they provide. They also find the leaves to be a tasty browse. (Just a side note--I love my Saanen. Isn't she cute?)

3. The chickens enjoy the shade and quick snacks. This is our rooster, Gus. You won't see too many more pictures of him, as he will be stew very soon. That's what happens to cranky roosters around here.

4. The kids LOVE to fill up their little pails with berries to munch on. I love watching the kids do this while I weed in the garden. This picture was taken at the start of my 4-year-old's picking for the day. After a while, her face and hands were stained purple!

Milk on the Homestead

In our family, we consume a LOT of milk. We can easily drink a full gallon in a day. We started talking about having either a cow or a goat on the property to help us keep up with our milk consumption. We settled on a few dairy goats to start for a number of reasons. The first being we have very little experience with larger livestock, and smaller animals seemed like a better place to start. Not only that, but the area we have fenced is better suited for goats. Finally, the overall cost made more sense to us.

We have 3 dairy goats, but only one is currently milking. She is a lovely Saanen doe. Even as a first freshener she is providing us with roughly 3/4 of a gallon of milk A DAY! Her milk is creamy and delicious.


I'm glad we only have one doe in milk at this time, because it helps prevent us from being overwhelmed with milk. In the meantime, I plan on trying my hand a cheese, soaps, and even ice cream! If in future, when we have a little extra milk, we can always feed it to the pigs and chickens. Dairy goats were definitely a great choice for a small homestead.